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>> António Ferreira · In the 1^st Person Interview (in Portuguese)
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Questionnaire/ Interview

· Describe your family, sound/ music, and cultural roots, highlighting one or various essential aspects defining and constituting who you are today. ·

António Ferreira: There was no episode, event or family situation in the past, significant to the role that music has had in my adult life.
Until the age of 16, I consumed music as an identarian recreation, natural to any common teenager. Meanwhile, at secondary school I become acquainted with several people that had an important role in the emerging Portuguese-rock scene. That happened between 1979 and the beginnings of the 1980s. Thus, I ended up as a privileged spectator of the production part of that process. This allowed me to have occasional access to music equipment such as synthesizers (Korg, ARP, Moog), and thus to get acquainted with the principles of electronics and composition. Here ‘composition’ meant some experiments informed by what I managed to glimpse from available commercial recordings. These were mainly represented by the electronic music groups of those times, and whose sonorities and structures I tried to imitate. It was all very crude and simple, but at the same time fun, and very exciting. I began to spend more and more time on it, especially after my enrolment in Chemistry Engineering at the university. Meanwhile, I also made more acquaintances and met people who had fabulous personal libraries and record collections. Those contacts allowed me to broaden my auditory and literary perspectives and to discover the plurality of contemporary music composition. Going to more concerts at the Gulbenkian, particularly during the seasons dedicated to contemporary music, also helped. As consequence, my interest in engineering started to diminish in an inversely proportional relation to my growing interest in music. If there’s any characteristic from those times that could be considered relevant to my future activities, it certainly is the total eclecticism of my readings, listening and musical interests. As I had not any formal musical training, I always followed the course of my curiosity. One consequence is a certain anarchic essence of my personality, spiced with some scepticism regarding the established authorities…

· When did you realise that you would dedicate your creative and artistic activity almost completely to electroacoustic composition? ·

AF: As the activities, described earlier, started to get my full attention, I decided that I had to organise my knowledge, perhaps even formalise it. I wanted to go from mere absorption to musical action. But in the 1980s where to go in Portugal to get that kind of knowledge? Were there any institutions elsewhere in Europe that I could access, considering my constrains, especially financial ones? At the time, low-cost travel meant Inter-rail trains, whenever the finances made it possible. From one summer trip, I brought with me the LP, Bernard Parmegiani’s “De Natura Sonorum” released by the GRM label. As I have declared several times, listening to this LP was simultaneously a revelation, a provocation, and a motivation. What was ‘that’? What was the motivation behind those compositions? And even more relevant, how could one do ‘that’? I read somewhere that one could compose almost exclusively with microphones and tape recorders…. A challenge to someone who has got familiar with the electroacoustics through the rock scene and treated tape recorders as simple recorders of sound! I ended up discovering the Sonology Institute in Utrecht that offered (well, with the payment of fees…) a kind of post-graduation precisely in that area. The complex history of how I managed to do it is a story for another occasion. In the end, in 1986, I was at the Den Haag Conservatory to where the Sonology Course was transferred. Much did happen and much have I learnt during my stay there, but I highlight three events: working in the analogic studio (nowadays a very trendy thing …) with the composer Jaap Vink; listening to the premiere of the piece “SUD” by Jean-Claude Risset, spatialised by himself and whose elegant combination of pre-recorded soundscapes and electronics, united by a subtle process, has always exercised an influence on me; and the recital, by a fellow student, of Morton Feldman’s piano piece “Triadic Memories”. The long harmonic ‘rotative’ structure of this work has encouraged me to always incorporate a harmonic ‘object’ into my following pieces… fun fact, on the day of the concert, sometime in 1987, at the Conservatory’s Grand Hall there were seven people, including the pianist and the ‘prompter’…
So, this is it! A creation field accessible to my capacities, with a highly technological component, a puzzling poetics, offering a questioning of established musical values and going beyond the concept of note. What’s not to like? I’ve become a confirmed electroacoustic composer…

· Do you follow your path according to a plan (for example, knowing that within ‘x’ years you will meet the ‘y’ goals)? Or perhaps the reality is too chaotic to create such determinations… ·

AF: The question of the determinism or not of our actions always piqued my thoughts… in some readings about quantum physics, I’ve recently found the following provocative postulate: according to the correctly established and accepted laws of nature, the future is determined by the past, except for certain occasional quantic events that we cannot control and are truly random. Free will? Its existence, or not, depends on how we define it. Nietzsche spoke of something similar: if the will is free, then it is not caused by anything. But if it is not caused by anything – ‘a not-caused’ cause – then it cannot be caused by an ‘I’, regardless of the ‘I’ definition. The language has always been subject to logical and contradictory syllogisms. Yes, the macro is drawn from the micro, as far as we can tell…, but which properties are we talking about? At the human scale, the only scale relevant to me, this provenience is not perceived or even relevant because, by being inescapable, it does not offer much help regarding inevitable questions that arise from interpersonal relationships, ethics, poetics… All this slightly snobbish discourse, to say that physics has not proven the existence of free will...nor deny it... on the other hand physics made us to question certain free-will definitions. Reductionism? Human existence doesn’t seem to me easily reducible to whatever sub-level… So, what is the relevance of this? Forecasting is difficult even with deterministic laws, for the results depend on initial conditions. Well, those conditions are mostly out of control in our lives, where much depends on contingent circumstances. Therefore, we navigate within a mixed system. Yes, I try to have goals and I even make plans, but life’s complexity is always creating different paths… to be taken or not. The fact that ‘according to the correctly established and accepted laws of nature, the future is determined by the past, except for certain occasional quantic events that we cannot control and are truly random’, does not keep me awake at night…

· What are presently your main artistic concerns? ·

AF: I've never liked the word ‘concern’ (‘preocupação’ in Portuguese). It implies that we think in a ‘pre’ fashion, being concerned by future events. Anticipating a necessarily uncertain future can be useful, but it can overwhelm the present moment. This said, the current conjecture (2022) of the global society is highly troubling and I end up distracted by this global conjuncture. But what can I do? Focusing on musical creation ends up being a great discipline. I have been lately composing a series of resolutely tonal miniatures for piano called “Retropias” (retro utopias). Perhaps by a lurking desire for security... Unfortunately, in the field of political solutions ‘retropia’ is now sadly in fashion, with aspirations to get back to a supposedly lost mythical golden age… Anyway, I would also like to explore spatial compositions using current tools of the Ambisonics system. I’m aware that it’s not something new, but I would like to give it a try.

· What are the differences between the instrumental (acoustic) and electroacoustic composition? To what extent the circulation between these two practices has enriched the music from the last decades? ·

AF: The existence of the electroacoustics, in a border sense, is one of the determining factors in 21^st century music, independently of the aesthetics or typology in question. It has caused paradigmatic changes, not only in the modality of listening but also in the timbre and textures of instrumental music. Let's think like this: sound can be described as mechanical action at a distance, a perturbation that propagates through a liquid, gas or solid environment. The acoustics describes this action with physical-mathematical tools, and well-established laws. Together with the development of the radio in the late 19^th century, the junction between electricity and the mechanics has given us an electro-mechanical-acoustic chain of transducers (microphones, speakers), transformers (amplifier, filters, etc), and the possibility of recording/ registering sound field oscillations on a physical medium (shellac and acetate records, magnetic tape, later digital media, ...).
Amplification and sound recording have thus created two displacements: in time (hearing can be delayed) and in space (any space can be sonified). Music listening has become quasi autonomous and time displaced, not relying anymore on momentaneous acoustic production.
Now, the existence of a medium for sound opens new paths for edition: improving, cleaning, repeating. It also enables the creation of commodities (records, editions) and their dissemination in time and space. Thus, and even more with the arrival of digitalisation, the generation/ composition of sound material has become almost trivial. Once more, every musical genre is affected. No wonder that we’ve witnessed the emergence of electroacoustic music as a more autonomous composition movement, willing to use concrete material from music (recording) or electronic devices to generate sound complexes. The electroacoustics has very much influenced the compositions of the last century. For instance, the gradual dephasing between two tape recordings has inspired the creation of a composition technique, a kind of modernised counterpoint that was transposed to acoustic instruments.
Nowadays, in instrumental composition and partly due to the task divisions established in the 19^th-century industrial society, we have hyper-specialised music performers and a whole logistic-support infrastructure. In contrast, in electroacoustic composition, much is always to be done – sounds must be constructed, their organisation is not obvious (nothing is systematised), and one relies on analogies from the past, poetical metaphors or whatever. The results are variable, and this modality of composition is merciless: if a composition is less successful, then it sounds awful. Many composers end up having an almost visceral hate towards the electroacoustics… is it still music? Or a curiosity destined to oblivion? But whether we like it or not, electroacoustic music and its sonorities exist and exercise an influence. This happens either by means of a direct junction of the electroacoustic chain with acoustic instrumentation, or by means of processes directly or vaguely inspired by the functioning of that chain. Listening to recent acoustic pieces, from the last twenty years – duos, trios, or string quartets –, I sometimes feel to be listening, as a result of the employed extended techniques, to an electroacoustic music composition.

· How could you describe the timbre of your music? Do you think it’s possible to find in it the music interests from your youth? ·

AF: The music that accompanied me during the first education years, let’s say until my twenties, has always stayed with me. But when I started Sonology I was confronted with the new possibilities at my disposal. Two aspects made me think: in the analogic studio with its oscillators (some of them adapted from the electronic-engineering material), it was trivial to produce long sound strata, overlapping gestures and create dynamic continuous changes. The most laborious was to create and articulate interesting short-duration sounds. In the digital studio, apart from the large workstation systems, there were mainly synthesizers controlled by the MIDI system and a small PC. I then felt that the issue was the inverse one: since the MIDI was based on the concept of a note and diatonic scale, it was trivial to produce short duration sounds whose relevance depended on the machinery’s possibilities (and the operator's inventiveness). In fact, the original implementation of the MIDI system (an industrial creation) had the piano as the ‘horizon’ instrument, with facilitated compositions based on hierarchy and modulations. Notes could, obviously, be sustained, but the production of long non-static sound textures with some evolutive controlling, required more effort. Over time, I have been developing strategies, either to oppose myself, or to make use of these aspects. This tension has stuck around, and I think it is audible in most of my music productions.

· Do humour and irony make part of your music? If yes, how are they expressed in your creation and what are their characteristics? ·

AF: I don't think so… perhaps one can find some irony in the titles. I also use it in my personal discourse, with the inevitable misunderstandings! But if someone finds humour or something funny in what I produce, that’s also fine.

· In your opinion and in accordance with your aesthetic stance and experience, what can a music discourse express? ·

AF: I think I’m closer to John Cage when he affirms that if he wanted to express something, he would then use the natural language. But, for me, the human voice is the primordial instrument. The sung or recited words have always been used in music. Verbal communication is also much more than the words established by a dictionary. What one says, how one says it, what one doesn’t say, the context, all this matters. We can get angry, emotional… and music can intensify the emotional experience into an almost total symbiosis. But we can get trapped in absolutist, essentialist (the total autonomy, absolute music) or constructivist (programme, context) ideas. These quarrels, that were so intense in the 19^th century when the rising modernity was dissolving the old rules, now seems less relevant. As I said, technology changed the relative importance of music in the society, and art is tolerated as a commodity. Anyway, to me, music exposes, and sonifies the subterranean changes that are always happening, beyond specific aesthetics or genres. I hear the change, even though I am not able to identify it clearly. It is a little like the vocal polyphony from the 15^th and 16^th centuries, whose contrapuntal virtuosity of the various voices reflected the plurality of the voices that were heard in the cities that were growing in importance.

· To what extent the new electronic and digital instruments can open new paths, and when can they become constraining? ·

AF: There’s a myriad of electronic and digital instruments, either virtual or tangible. Distraction and dispersion are, for me, the major risks: we can end up distracted by the process and forget about the music. All of them implement an idea, a concept, a way of thinking and doing. As such, we are in constant interaction, dealing with, and subverting the concepts of the person who programmed them. Many of these instruments are useful and efficient, but it is important to have a clear vision of what we want. If not, we can waste hours just playing around with parameters… I’m not prescribing a composition ethics. Everyone chooses what is useful for them. But in my case, the practice in the analogic studio was very fruitful, because it demanded a clarity in the use and combination of several generating and transforming modules. It was also revealing and didactic to learn programming languages applied either to signal processing or composition itself. This has forced me to have disciplined thought and logical transparency, a good contrast to my anarchic tendencies. It also allowed us to create our own instruments and to merge practices. Nonetheless, this imposed discipline and clarity are simultaneously the force and the limitation of the digital instruments. As I said, I’m very anarchic in my actual practice, but I recognise the importance of these lessons, even if it's just to deliberately ignore them.

· In what sense, are research and invention inseparable elements of music creation, and more generally, of art? ·

AF: If we replace ‘invention and research’ with ‘trial and error’, we perhaps not only have a more realistic description of the practice of art, but also of almost all human activity. Research, invention, or trial, are inseparable from the curiosity or even from a certain existential anxiety which agitates us… However, at the same time, we need to resolve the question of our material necessities. We need to have some material conditions for the creation. The solutions for this are personal and individual, but I believe that I can say the following: invention and experiment in music creation need some sponsorship, with the unavoidable divorce from the commercial reality. This sounds like uncurable elitist arrogance, even more so because this solution points to academia (universities), or to sponsored sectors (radios, conservatories). Nevertheless, it was this sponsorship that enabled the exploration of electronic composition, and the consequent explosion of creations in the fields of timbre and texture. It was in this context that the sounds of nature were appreciated as possible music and incorporated into compositions; it was here that some forgotten traditions of the so-called Western music were rediscovered and transformed into contemporary creations. One created a vast fertile field of ideas which have spread across all the genres of music creation. Hadn’t there been this sponsorship and the freedom to experiment, invent, research, and even disseminate, the current music-creation scenario wouldn’t have been so vibrant, plural, and exciting as it now is.

· In the interview given to the MIC.PT in 2013 you said: ‘my main instrument is the practice of listening’ ¹. How do you listen to music? Is it a more rational or a more emotional process? ·

AF: For me it’s evident that what we designate as ‘rational’ or ‘emotional’ makes part of a unified experience. The ‘quick’ thought of the emotions is symbiotic with the ‘slow’ thought of the formalisation and rationalisation. The emotions ‘mark’, positively or negatively, what’s put into evidence by the slow process of rationalisation, and what is later incorporated into our memory.
The memory is the context directing and affecting our expectations, particularly what we listen to. Somebody said that electroacoustic music is made by listening and made for listening. One can argue that this is the case with all music! Composing means making audible choices. Even more in a practice whose concrete medium (a tape or now a digital sound file), is simultaneously ‘a score and a sonic concretisation’. It isn’t inappropriate to say that listening has a personal history and that, generally, every group, society, and time, has a listening culture. This culture is in constant mutation, which presently is accelerated due to the process of dislocation in the time and space enabled by the electroacoustic chain. Nowadays, the relation the people have with music is mostly created through sound recordings. Let me mention a short personal history to illustrate this: somewhere in my life I spent various months listening only to recordings of Indian ragas. In some of the creations, the Western violin was adapted to function as the main instrument. Later, I returned to listen to a recording that I knew very well, of one of Beethoven’s string quartets performed by a renowned ensemble. I was surprised to hear myriads of micro inflections and microtonalities, as well the different qualities of successive strikes of the bow on the strings. I had never consciously heard such things before. I got ‘deconditioned’ by immersing myself into the sonority of a different culture, where the concept of ‘note’ is a very fluid object. Hence my conviction that the practice of listening needs to be worked, until it becomes a kind of instrument that can be ‘played’.

· In the interview given to the MIC.PT in 2016, the composer João Madureira said that ‘music is philosophy and politics, which is a way of inhabiting the world’ ². Do you feel close to this affirmation? ·

AF: Pretty much. Being here in this world, as someone who has some familiarity with the music creation, implies a restless poetics of questioning. I spoke of composition as making audible choices, even though, in some cases, apparently there’s nothing to hear; but there’s always something to listen to. We can make a parallel with the ethics: in part it emerges from our interaction with the others, but also from peer pressure and social traditions. Maybe genetics has also something to say... What is the best choice for our behaviour? We only know when making it…, but we are not born completely taught and we had an education, intentional or not, thus our decision has also a history. Following recent philosophy currents, I recognise the existence of perspectives and constructions in our relations with the world. But it doesn’t imply that the objects of this world are mere constructions. There are real objects independent of us, as well as our own constructions, and these ones are also real; from a realism exclusively interested in a world without spectators, or a constructivism exclusively interested in a world only with spectators, towards a world with people. We are inside the world, and we can’t leave it to have a ‘broader’ perspective. And this causes that our actions and our ethics have always a political, social dimension involving negotiations with other people, all immersed in a context. We can find explicit political positions in music: composers who defend that radical political changes imply a radical art. Or we can observe the practice of improvisation as an aural manifestation of various possibilities of fluid relationships among diverse people. Therefore, to say that music and politics can't mix is, for me, somewhat unrealistic. I understand that one would like to strive for the autonomy of the art in opposition to the environment of ‘the politicians’ perceived as devious, hypocritical, and absolutist. But politics isn’t reduced to such a thing, the same way music creation isn’t reduced to office intrigues at a conservatory. We are humans and negotiating common grounds can generate confrontations. To overcome them is the essence of politics. We all do it to a greater or lesser degree. This being said, and referring to the present, the people involved in music creation can’t hide themselves within a supposed autonomy of the art. I don’t intend to tell the people how to act, but sometimes one needs to clarify positions and accept the possible consequences.

· How in your activity do you reconcile the opposition between ‘the occupation’ and ‘the vocation’? ·

AF: I don’t know if I understand the question… I can say that the music creation is very important for my existence. But there are material needs that need to be taken into consideration, for instance dealing with financial issues. I have been developing a parallel activity as a consultant in the field of Acoustics and Sound Pollution. It ensures my survival. This is my solution. I like both activities however it’s the music that keeps me going… to be occupied with it is a genuine pleasure.

· Do you prefer to work isolated in the ‘tranquillity of the countryside’, or in the middle of the ‘urban confusion’? ·

AF: I have always preferred to work, no matter what, in a calm, and even somewhat isolated environment. There are the ones who like, for example, to study in cafes, saying that the ambient buzz helps them to focus. They need a background for activity to sustain the concentration, and the absence of this activity disturbs them. Sometimes, they feel compelled to activities to fill the absence. For me the situation is quite the opposite. The activity background quickly becomes too dominant. It distracts me, and I start to look at people, to imagine stories, etc. It’s difficult for me to concentrate. It is also true that, due to the necessity to share space, I have always composed using headphones, so I am used to work with a certain isolation.

· Select and highlight three works from your catalogue and explain your choices. ·

AF: Looking at what I have done, there are evidently pieces with which I don´t identify myself any longer… and other ones, which have stayed out of the catalogue, have been gaining space within my appreciation. I think this is a common situation. When it comes to the highlighted works, I would choose the following ones: “more adult music” from 1987, “Les Barricades Mysterieuses” from 2009, and “About the love of Physics” from 2017.
The first work, “more adult music”, was composed between March and April 1987, during my stay at the Den Haag Conservatory. In this piece I tried to deal with the flexible possibilities of an analogical studio and the MIDI system, whose concept is based on the note and diatonic keyboard. It was my first truly thought and structured piece. It has three audible aspects: 1) the reciting voice; 2) a pointillist structure generated by a MIDI/ computer system controlling a synthesizer through a programme written by me, which followed various parameters extracted from the voice, via a microphone; 3) and an electroacoustic structure, composed on ‘tape’, that serves as a ground to the whole. The recitation was free, except for some sync moments, and the electroacoustics had the role of a sonic score. Thus, “more adult music” is somewhat mobile, it doesn’t have a strictly fixed version. This was a very fruitful experience.
The second piece, “Les Barricades Mysterieuses” (2009), is a ‘classical’ electroacoustic one. It was one of the pieces that gave me the most pleasure to compose, being one of those almost magical conjunctures, where the material, the structure, the development emerged and fused in a very fast and almost magical manner. For me “Les Barricades Mysterieuses” is one of my most accomplished electroacoustic pieces.
Finally, the third work, “About the love of Physics” (2017), resulted from my attempts to re-confront the electronics with the MIDI system limitations. Here I use the sound of a digitally sampled piano. It serves to generate structures with microtonal scales, as a material for electroacoustic transformations and as a base for the microtonal overtones that float throughout the piece. “About the love of Physics” is a work on ‘tape’ (for false piano…), and when it was presented live, I had the experience of a total ‘immersion’ into the sound. I also felt that a major part of the audience was in a similar symbiotic state. It was a very strong moment and one that occurs rarely.

· Could you reveal on what you are presently working and what are your artistic projects planned for 2023, 2024, …? ·

AF: Due to the present conjuncture I need to focus, more than I wish to, on aspects concerning the material survival. Beyond 2023, that’s a too distant future… As for artistic projects, there will be some editions which I would like make, to release the vast material accumulated during the years. But it will depend on the available possibilities.

· In the 2013 MIC.PT interview you said: ‘…and here we are – there are excellent composers and performers, but in Portuguese they can, unfortunately, only use the name. The continuous realisation of projects, the existence of commissions, of between-arts projects, has always bumped into the discontinuity of Portugal’s socio-economic project’ ³. After almost ten years, how do you presently find the situation of Portuguese contemporary music? ·

AF: When it comes to the national situation, my knowledge is somewhat fragmented and incomplete. But I think that today I keep the essence of my observation. A lot depends on the voluntary actions by some people, although there is some institutional support (universities, conservatories, multiyear grants). One observes that due to the accessibility of electroacoustic systems, electronic music has innumerable practices and a plurality of agents. But the freelance creators are left on their own, with corresponding financial stresses, since, as it is generally considered, ‘who runs for pleasure doesn't get tired’ (Portuguese saying: ‘quem corre por gosto não cansa’). For some, the solution is to follow the academic path. But that is another story, not fit for everyone…

· If you hadn’t followed the path of working with the sound (either in the domain of electroacoustic composition or acoustic engineering), what alternative paths could you have taken? ·

AF: Probably I would have followed the path of Chemistry Engineering, perhaps in the field of Organic Chemistry or Biochemistry. Moreover, I have always been fascinated with the synthesis of fragrances and tastes. I could have also chosen another field: philosophy, which attracts me a lot. Yet it would involve a complete academic career and I don’t like to teach. The most certain outcome would be becoming a common, professionally well-succeeded engineer, with a comfortable financial life and perhaps with some cardiovascular or overweight problems by now. In this alternative life path, music probably would be downgraded to the entertainment category.

· In one of the 2020 interviews the Austrian composer Georg Friedrich Haas said that ‘the new art creators act as yeast in the society’ ⁴. What is, in your opinion, the role that art music plays in the society and how is it possible to increase the importance of this role? ·

AF: I should say that I really appreciate the music of Georg Friedrich Haas, particularly his string quartets. In the Quartet no. 2, he explores spectral fields, and the microtonal figures that one can hear in many of his works. In the Quartet no. 3, performed in total darkness, I find a curious parallel to the acousmatic situation of hiding the sound sources. A situation central to the electroacoustic music presentation.
On diverse occasions, he has questioned the position of the contemporary classical composition in a world ‘more and more plunged into the darkness and losing all the utopias’. Well, one can say that attitudes towards composition oscillate between the values of order/ disorder, discipline/ indiscipline, hierarchy/ anarchy, in a continuum reflecting the complexity of the existence. Such values create tensions and confrontations, and it is somewhat obvious to say that such aspects are reflected in the music creations of various times.
On the other hand, art music has always been sponsored, and what’s allowed as creative freedom partly depends on the relation between the musicians and their sponsors (a class, a society, or an audience). There’s this tension since the music, due to its potentially ecstatic effect, has always been considered as politically suspicious. It is always a bad sign when a regime starts to control the artists. However, a society, by means of public institutions, can create sanctuaries of freedom, whose existence encourages freedom of thought and consequently creative activity. This is a recent historic development, and it allows for the existence of art spaces, where works such as the ones by Georg Friedrich Haas can emerge. One can feel this possibility of composing in relative freedom as a perhaps questionable privilege of the so-called Global North. But the expansion of our listening, enabled by such works, is parallel to expanding our consciousness of existence. The survival of art music is a plural social value, and it should be supported by all possible means, either public or private. This said, art music represents a tiny part of the global music activity, and it has difficulty to attract audience and listeners. I don’t know how to change this, or if it even is something to be changed. But as long the listeners exist, music creation will continue…

· In terms of aesthetics and techniques the history of Western music is full of births, ruptures, deaths, renewals, continuations, discontinuations, other ruptures, and so on… Making a ‘futurology’ exercise, could you project the future of Western art music? ·

AF: It is a difficult question, and I believe that I won’t manage to give a satisfactory or relevant answer. Let’s say that Western art music still has in its core the 19^th-century idea of a universality of music. But which music? The reality is that most of the composers, in the Western art music, are in the situation of almost exclusively writing for specialised instrumental ensembles, for specialised festivals and for a specialised audience. Obviously, the tensions between the inclinations of the creators, the materials, and the language at the disposal of the listeners, are an everlasting constant. Thus, presently we have a labyrinthic profusion of styles and possibilities, but one can feel a certain stasis. That is, the rhythm and the intensity of ruptures and innovations seems to have diminished, when compared with the storm of the second half of the 20^th century. It is argued (and I believe that is has been documented), that during that period Western art music (and more generally, the artistic creation) benefited from a great support and sponsorship, as part of the Cold-War confrontational politics. The West needed to shine, and in line with this strategy, there was a great support for creators, experiences, and the circulation of works. When this historic situation ended, the support was drastically diminished. Perhaps, that might have led to the present state of an almost continuous recirculation of the ‘old’ vanguards. It is true that at any time there are always continuities with the recent past. But my sensation is that a kind of hegemony of disruption become the norm. I don’t know… perhaps new ways are being prepared, since the project of modernity itself has always been continuously modernised. Perhaps this is the new modernity, always more plural. Perhaps everything is cyclical. Perhaps, and paraphrasing the poet, the meaning of all of this is to get where we started, and thus to re-listen to the music as if for the first time. Or perhaps I’m just getting old…

António Ferreira, November/ December, 2022
© MIC.PT

FOOTNOTES

¹ Interview with António Ferreira conducted by the MIC.PT in February 2013, available at: LINK.
² Interview with João Madureira conducted by the MIC.PT in October 2018, available at: LINK.
³ Interview with António Ferreira conducted by the MIC.PT in February 2013 and available at: LINK.
⁴ Interview with Georg Friedrich Haas conducted by Filip Lech in June 2020 and available at the Culture.pl portal: LINK.

António Ferreira · In the ^st Person Interview (in Portuguese)

António Ferreira · Playlist